High-resolution, high-density screens are expected on most high-end phones and tablets today. Everything from the iPhone 5 to the Samsung Galaxy S 4 to the Nexus 10 is trying to pack as many pixels as it can into a given screen size to increase the sharpness of on-screen text and images.

You often hold a phone or tablet pretty close to your face, so the benefits of a high-resolution, high-density display are easy to see. Perhaps it makes sense then that the technology hasn't been picked up as quickly in laptop computers. To date, there have only been a few serious contenders: Apple's 15-inch and 13-inch Retina MacBook Pros, Google's Chromebook Pixel, and now Toshiba's Kirabook.

We're sure that more high-density Windows laptops are on the way, but the Kirabook is the first to make it to market. The laptop raises some natural questions: Does a computer that is both thinner and lighter than the Pixel and the Pros skimp on battery life to achieve these feats? Is the Kirabook good enough to justify its jaw-dropping $1,599.99 starting price? Most importantly, can Windows support high-density displays as well as OS X, Chrome OS, iOS, Android, and others can?

Body and build quality

Specs at a glance: Toshiba Kirabook

Screen

2560×1440 at 13.3" (221 ppi)

OS

Windows 8 Pro 64-bit

CPU

2.0GHz Intel Core i7-3537U (Turbo up to 3.1GHz)

RAM

8GB 1600MHz DDR3 (non-upgradeable)

GPU

Intel HD Graphics 4000 (integrated)

HDD

256GB solid-state drive

Networking

802.11n (2.4GHz only), Bluetooth 4.0

Ports

3x USB 3.0, HDMI, card reader, headphones

Size

12.44" × 8.15" × 0.7" (315.98 × 207.01 × 17.78mm)

Weight

2.97 lbs (1.35kg)

Battery

3380 mAh

Warranty

2 years

Starting price

$1,599.99

Price as reviewed

$1,999.99

Other perks

Webcam, backlit keyboard

The 2.97-pound Kirabook crams the high-density display of a laptop like the Retina MacBook Pro (3.57 pounds) or Chromebook Pixel (3.35 pounds) into something that weighs about as much as the 13-inch MacBook Air. It's a bit thicker than some other Ultrabooks (0.7" compared to 0.5" for Acer's Aspire S7), but it's still light and very easy to carry around in a bag.

Most laptops today are either rectangles or gently rounded rectangles, but the Kirabook splits the difference. Its back corners are rounded and its front corners aren't. This is a simple design touch, but it helps to make the Kirabook easier to identify at a glance. Like other Ultrabooks, it uses a tapered design that's thicker in the back of the laptop (where the system components and fan are located) and thinner in the front, which angles the keyboard slightly toward the user.

The laptop's construction is partly "magnesium alloy" and partly plastic. The lid, palm rest, and keyboard area is all made of a lightly brushed gray metal, while the bottom case is made of plastic that has the same color but no brushed-metal texture. Four round, rubber feet on the bottom of the laptop are also joined by the stereo speaker grilles. The positioning means that sound is amplified slightly by a hard surface like a desk or table but muffled slightly by a soft surface like a couch or lap—either way, the sound quality is as middling as we've come to expect from most Ultrabooks. There's a bit of distortion at higher volume levels.

Update: Toshiba tells us that the bottom of the laptop is also made of magnesium alloy and not plastic—it looks and feels more like plastic than either the lid or the palm rest, but they're apparently the same material. I'm told that the lid is pressed magnesium alloy and that the bottom of the laptop is die cast, which accounts for the differences in how they feel.

Enlarge/ Logos are happily pretty understated on the Kirabook: There's one Toshiba logo on the lid, one underneath the screen in the laptop's bezel, and "Kira" and Harmon/Kardon logos on the palm rest. Windows, Intel, and Energy Star stickers are likewise understated and easy to remove.

Andrew Cunningham

Enlarge/ In length and width, the Kirabook is actually a bit smaller than the MacBook Air even though they have identically sized screens. The Kirabook uses a brushed metal texture rather than the MacBook's smooth aluminum.

Andrew Cunningham

Enlarge/ The power button is surrounded by a light and positioned above the keyboard. The Kirabook's palm rest shares its brushed metal texture with the lid.

Andrew Cunningham

Enlarge/ The Kirabook is a bit thicker than the 13-inch MacBook Air, but the two weigh about the same. There are two USB 3.0 ports and an HDMI port on the laptop's left side.

Andrew Cunningham

Enlarge/ Another USB 3.0 port, an SD card reader, and a headphone jack are on the right.

Andrew Cunningham

Enlarge/ There are four rubber feet and two vents on the bottom of the laptop for the computer's single fan.

Andrew Cunningham

There are also two fan vents on the bottom of the laptop, both used for the laptop's single fan. During light and general use, fan noise isn't a problem—in a room with light ambient noise the laptop is essentially silent. It's when the hardware starts straining that things get less pleasant. As the device picks up speed its fan sounds more and more like a vacuum cleaner.

Finally, the Kirabook has a nice selection of ports for a laptop of its size: three USB 3.0 ports (two on the left and one on the right—one of which can be used to charge a device when the laptop is asleep), a full-size HDMI port, a card reader, and a headphone jack.

Keyboard and trackpad

Enlarge/ An all-around excellent keyboard and trackpad. Note that the trackpad is the same shape as the computer itself.

Andrew Cunningham

The Kirabook's keyboard shares similarities with past Toshiba keyboards, but overall the layout is an improvement over what we've seen from the company in the past. Most of the keys are just a bit shorter than they are in other keyboards, but they're just as wide—instead of being square, they're ever-so-slightly rectangular. The bottom row of keys (which includes the spacebar) is slightly taller, and the top row (the function keys, delete key, and a few others) is a little shorter and narrower. Arrow keys are half-height, as they often are in Ultrabooks. The key sizing and arrangement is very easy to get used to if you're coming from any other chiclet keyboard, and I was quickly able to type at my normal speeds.

The quality of the keyboard is also an improvement. Travel is good, and the keys are nice and firm—the mushiness we noticed on last year's crop of Toshiba Ultrabooks is entirely absent. Where the old Toshiba keys were also entirely flat, the Kirabook's are gently scooped to better fit your fingers. The keyboard's backlight is also bright and even. It's important to get the keyboard right when you're making a laptop, and the Kirabook got it right where other Toshiba Ultrabooks have failed.

The trackpad shares its shape with the laptop itself. The top edges are curved and the bottom edges are squared off. Aside from this thoughtful design touch, the trackpad is very much like all the other trackpads we've been seeing in Windows laptops lately. It's a single, clickable piece of plastic with a textured surface that supports multiple touch points. Basic gestures like two-fingered scrolling and pinch-to-zoom work as intended, as do the Windows 8 trackpad gestures. We had no issues with palm rejection. Some specific applications (Chrome, we're looking at you) had trouble with scrolling, but we're more inclined to blame that on Chrome than the Kirabook since other applications were fine.

The screen

Enlarge/ Slim bezels around the LCD help the Kirabook fit a 13.3-inch screen into a package that's almost an inch shorter than the Air.

Andrew Cunningham

The build quality and design of the Kirabook are generally excellent, but the screen is the real star of the show. At 221 ppi, its 13.3-inch 2560×1440 screen is playing in the same ballpark as the Retina MacBook Pros and the Chromebook Pixel. While it's not the first computer to market with this kind of a screen, it's the first Windows PC to include one (we'll talk more about how Windows handles the pressure in a moment).

The display itself is bright and colorful and, as is to be expected, optimized text and images look very crisp. Its viewing angles are worse than what we've seen in other high-end PCs of late, though; colors shift and you'll notice the screen washing out if you bend the screen toward yourself at a 70 or 80 degree angle. The screen doesn't become unusable unless you're looking at it from an extreme angle, but it's not quite as good as either the Pixel or the Retina MacBook Pros. The hinge is stiff enough that the screen doesn't wobble too much when you reach out to touch it, but not so stiff that it's impossible to lift the lid with one hand.

In the higher-priced, $1,799 and $1,999 models, the laptop adds to its list of features a 10-point capacitive touchscreen. The touchscreen uses a layer of Corning's Concore Glass, a scratch-resistant surface which reduces the overall thickness of the screen by integrating the touch layer into the glass itself. This is a bit different from "in-cell" touchscreens we've seen in phones like the iPhone and Galaxy S4, which integrate the touch layer into the LCD display rather than the glass itself (for more information about how modern capacitive touch works, see this article). Corning's marketing materials for Concore imply that its solution is better-suited to larger surfaces, but in both cases the implementation is similar: reduce thickness by integrating the touch layer into one of the others.

We spent some time navigating the OS, tapping and swiping various onscreen elements and playing games. We noticed no particular problems with the screen on our review unit. The screen picks up fingerprints and smudges (a sad but inevitable fact of life with gadgets) but my fingers glide across it without any undue resistance. The glass layer does make the screen extremely reflective, though.

Which is true up to a point. On the other hand Microsoft never forced their hand like apple did with its retina initiative. Make a set of new hardware, update all your first party apps with it and make a big media splash essentially forcing most first party apps to update in the midterm as well.

I think Microsoft didn't really care until apple forced their hand. Which is the reason for the shitty scaling support and 768p notebooks. What does it matter if customers suffer through terrible screens it's not like they have a choice anyway.

It also helps that apple doesn't have 15 different user interface apis that went in and out of vogue over the years. Managed non managed xaml silverlight win32 etc. Pp.

And I don't even like apple that much it's like they are in a winter sleep right now and osx is if anything worse then two versions ago (my battery life never reached snow leopard times again) and the windows7 ui is better than osx. On the other hand they don't screw customers for ideological reasons like ms with windows8 and they can get big changes like the retina stuff done. Take your poison I suppose.

Windows has two modes of desktop scaling - XP-style (which I believe is still the default in at least Vista and 7), and 'new style', which was introduced with Vista. Which did the review use? Can you share screenies of the other mode as well?

Wow, a Toshiba laptop I could see myself owning, that's a first. Too bad about the loud fan and scaling issues, but at least the latter will probably improve in time with updated software. Well, if very high res displays become common anyways.

This notebook has some promising features, but then has some aspects to it which make me just stop considering it like chiclet keyboad.

My six year old T43 is kind of on its last legs, still works fine, but i want a replacement. I can't find a notebook that emulates its design goals, they're all trying to be apple, but trying to be netbooks (in certain aspects), or trying to be plastic craptastic devices, none of them are doing a decent laptop that ticks every box and I would like to get.

I'm really dirty with lenovo for abandoning the keyboard layout of old, and i wish notebook manufacturers would at least consider 16:10 ratio displays. I can't believe that many of them are still using the ghastly 1366x768 (shudders) resolution.

It also helps that apple doesn't have 15 different user interface apis that went in and out of vogue over the years. Managed non managed xaml silverlight win32 etc. Pp.

Not to mention support for all those applications. That is the biggest issue with Windows scaling imo. The software library is gargantuan and written in many many different ways. That is nothing MS can do much about anyway. Which is why the Metro thing came to be I guess.

At this stage such a screen is wasted on a 13 inch laptop running Windows imo.

A $1600 laptop with a plastic bottom, lots of fan noise, speakers on the bottom (genius) and trying to vent hot air out the bottom too.

I don't know why Toshiba bothered. These are the same issues (or worse in the case of the speaker placement) that they had with laptops the last time I bought one about a decade ago.

This. Plus, folks really need to stop with the super-reflective screens - the Daystar is bad enough already without it beaming straight into my face while coding outside on a sunny day... or inside under normal lighting conditions.

Which is true up to a point. On the other hand Microsoft never forced their hand like apple did with its retina initiative. Make a set of new hardware, update all your first party apps with it and make a big media splash essentially forcing most first party apps to update in the midterm as well.

I think Microsoft didn't really care until apple forced their hand. Which is the reason for the shitty scaling support and 768p notebooks. What does it matter if customers suffer through terrible screens it's not like they have a choice anyway.

It also helps that apple doesn't have 15 different user interface apis that went in and out of vogue over the years. Managed non managed xaml silverlight win32 etc. Pp.

And I don't even like apple that much it's like they are in a winter sleep right now and osx is if anything worse then two versions ago (my battery life never reached snow leopard times again) and the windows7 ui is better than osx. On the other hand they don't screw customers for ideological reasons like ms with windows8 and they can get big changes like the retina stuff done. Take your poison I suppose.

As far as the "Retina initiative", Apple had an far easier time because all of the hardware running their OS was standardized (made by them), whereas Microsoft's OS is installed on much larger variety of devices.

And again, Microsoft designed different UI APIs because they tried to appease a broad range of partners, of which Apple has virtually none.

But I agree, Windows 8's UI moves are a little strange compared to Windows 7, but I won't trash it until I see it running on a tablet (like a Surface Pro) in a production environment.

The name initially made me think KIRFbook; the side-view and bottom pictures next to the Macbook didn't dispel the notion. A brushed-metal lid tacked onto a cheap plastic chassis isn't going to cut it anymore on a device with high-end aspirations.

Why can't Microsoft do some of the scaling for the developers? Why not translate straight font calls into 2x and call it a day? Graphics will be blurry but text won't.

They can and do-- that's why Chrome and the Firefox installer show up scaled and blurry. The DWM will automatically scale apps that don't claim to be resolution-independent.

Windows' problem are apps like Photoshop which claim to be resolution-independent but then render at 1x anyways (or worse, render incorrectly). This is partly Microsoft's fault, for not having a good unmanaged solution for coding DPI-aware apps (WPF was meant to solve this problem, but never really caught on), but is also partly the fault of app developers-- the current style of DPI scaling has been possible since Vista; support it already...

"Otherwise they'll actually look a bit worse on a high-density display than they would on a lesser one."

I'm not sure I'm clear on why un-optimised images / text would look worse. Surely if they are pixel-doubled (what I assume is happening, is this my folly?) but occupy the same physical space on screen, they will look identical to images/text on a non high-DPI monitor?

Or is it that having un-optimised images surrounded by optimised ones gives the perception that the un-optimised images are worse?

(This is assuming everything is doubled, rather than say a 1.5x scale, as this particular quote is referenced just after talking about things that are at 200% scale rather than 165%)

What about the "Bane of Windows-Notebooks" aka preinstalled crapware? Is the thing actually useable out of the box or does it take a complete cleansing and OS-reinstallation to get a proper working environment?

"Otherwise they'll actually look a bit worse on a high-density display than they would on a lesser one."

I'm not sure I'm clear on why un-optimised images / text would look worse. Surely if they are pixel-doubled (what I assume is happening, is this my folly?) but occupy the same physical space on screen, they will look identical to images/text on a non high-DPI monitor?

That's what I thought too until I got a Retina MacBook Pro. Trust me, they actually looks worse.

The software library is gargantuan and written in many many different ways. That is nothing MS can do much about anyway. Which is why the Metro thing came to be I guess.

I was just thinking the same thing - if the scaling works so well in Metro, I can't help but wonder how different the user experience in Win8 could be if they'd tried for a solid break from the Win32 style - allow old programs to use it for backwards compatibility, but have some sort of requirement going forward that new UI methods be used.

I don't know how they could enforce it, though. And there'd be far more flailing of limb and gnashing of teeth than when Apple deprecates something in OS X.

I'm curious for whom the SD card readers are targeted? I have one in the Thinkpad, and I've never used it. Most people connect their cameras with a USB cord. If you need a card reader, and external dongle is about $5, yet it seems a huge number of laptops include them.

The reason I ask is that it seems like it takes up quite a bit of space and adds another hole in the laptop frame for a relatively small market.

$1600 for a Toshiba laptop? I don't care what specs it has, Toshiba - like HTC - don't support their products after a couple of months. I've had numerous friends in college own Toshiba laptops and they couldn't find drivers when they tried to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7. Not to mention their support is lacking.

"It's possible that Toshiba was just trying to get the Kirabook out ahead of the flood of Haswell machines we'll probably see at Computex next month, but the people being targeting with this laptop are probably more likely to pay attention to this sort of thing."

I'm puzzled as to why they are releasing this thing now. This system cries out for the Haswell. And next month, there will probably be a slew of comparably priced Retina resolution competitors which do have it.

rMBP's have 4 times the pixels. so for every pixel in a regular laptop, rMBP has 4. when a program is not optimized for rMBP it only activates one out of the four pixels. the icon/text will occupy the same space as regular screens but the image won't look sharp because of the 3 unused pixels for every used one!

That's not accurate. All four pixels are used, they're just the same color and so things look blocky compared to other parts of the screen.

For the asking price I would be expecting dedicated gfx like the rPro to be honest.

At first glance I too wondered where the discrete video card was. Then I pulled up the Apple site. They are both 13" with identical processors, screen sizes and resolutions at very similar prices. I need to stop being such a fanboy...

"Otherwise they'll actually look a bit worse on a high-density display than they would on a lesser one."

I'm not sure I'm clear on why un-optimised images / text would look worse. Surely if they are pixel-doubled (what I assume is happening, is this my folly?) but occupy the same physical space on screen, they will look identical to images/text on a non high-DPI monitor?

That's what I thought too until I got a Retina MacBook Pro. Trust me, they actually looks worse.

I haven't used a rMBP, but I've used a 3840x2400 screen with pixel doubling and it looked fine as a 1920x1200 screen (actually it looked really good). That was nearly a decade ago with Windows XP, so the entire screen had a consistent resolution. Could that be what makes the difference?

Thank you very much Ars for seeing how well Ubuntu runs on it that follow up article AND at the repair-ability of this laptop.

I always feel like repair ability is the one big thing most reviewers dont talk about at all that I want to see the most. (Besides checking Ubuntu support but I feel that is asking a lot most of the time since most laptops are sold with Windows)

rMBP's have 4 times the pixels. so for every pixel in a regular laptop, rMBP has 4. when a program is not optimized for rMBP it only activates one out of the four pixels. the icon/text will occupy the same space as regular screens but the image won't look sharp because of the 3 unused pixels for every used one!

That's not accurate. All four pixels are used, they're just the same color and so things look blocky compared to other parts of the screen.

You'd think that if 1 pixel was replaced with 4 in the same exact amount of space then it would be able to show images at the 'old', lower resolution and it'd look identical to regular 'non-retina' displays. Nope. Since both with regular 1440x900 AND the 2880x1800 are both exactly 15.4", it doesn't quite make sense to me...

I wonder if it's just text down-scaling to lower resolutions isn't 'mature' enough to look the same. :\

"Otherwise they'll actually look a bit worse on a high-density display than they would on a lesser one."

I'm not sure I'm clear on why un-optimised images / text would look worse. Surely if they are pixel-doubled (what I assume is happening, is this my folly?) but occupy the same physical space on screen, they will look identical to images/text on a non high-DPI monitor?

FrisbeeFreek, I use the built-in SD card reader of my work laptop frequently. It wouldn't be a make-or-break thing to leave out but it is faster and more convenient to pop a card out of a camera (or a card someone hands me from their camera) than it is to dig out a card reader or camera cable. It is one less cable I need when I travel and I don't need to depend on camera power to transfer images (a rarer issue but always a concern).

I don't see my use case as being common (I'm 'the image guy' at work) so I'm with you on wondering why they include it so often.